Governments, corporations, universities, other institutions, and individuals are increasingly concerned about security and safety. In one example involving crime, on Apr. 16, 2007, a student at Virginia Tech University killed 32 people and injured 24 others. As a result, many parents, students, and university administrators are increasingly concerned about security on college campuses.
In one example involving terrorism, General Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated on CNN, “As we focused on the security of military installations around the country, we really had no process for sharing discrete bits of information that might be related to security concerns. For example, if a suspicious-looking vehicle entered into Ft. Belvoir, the guards would record that occurrence. But could you say for sure that that information would be sent to Andrews Air Force Base, Ft. Dix, the other military installations, the FBI, or the CIA. The answer is no.” Accordingly, the military is concerned about retrieving and managing data from numerous sources, including data from video cameras, legacy systems, and other sensory devices.
In one example involving safety, an explosion in a Texas oil refinery killed 15 people and injured 180 others. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board determined that various factors, one of which was the absence of adequate experience in the refinery, contributed to the accident: “As the unit was being heated, the Day Supervisor, an experienced ISOM operator, left the plant at 10:47 a.m. due to a family emergency. The second Day Supervisor was devoting most of his attention to the final stages of the ARU startup; he had very little ISOM experience and, therefore, did not get involved in the ISOM startup. No experienced supervisor or ISOM technical expert was assigned to the raffinate section startup after the Day Supervisor left, although BP's safety procedures required such oversight.” (See Investigation Report: Refinery Explosion and Fire, Chemical Safety Board, March 2007, pg. 52.) Accordingly, large and small corporations are concerned about ensuring that proper safety and security procedures are followed.
Therefore, as recognized by the present inventors, what are needed are a method, apparatus, and system for intelligent security and safety. What is needed is a method for monitoring data from various systems, including video data. What is also needed is a method for intelligent alerting of appropriate individuals based on the data.
Accordingly, it would be an advancement in the state of the art to provide an apparatus, system, and method for intelligent security and safety that receives data inputs from various systems, including video cameras, and that generates intelligent alerts based on the data inputs.
It is against this background that various embodiments of the present invention were developed.